Web Literacy for College Students 2nd Ed

When students are looking for information on the web, there are strategies they can use to help them determine whether the information is accurate.

• Previous verification – Check to see if someone has already fact-checked the accuracy of information.
• Locate the source – Find the original source of the information or claim to determine its trustworthiness.
• Credibility of source – Verify the credentials of the author or creator of the source and read what others have said or written about the source.
• Start over – If you are not able to find sources to substantiate the information or claim, look for another source.

If any of these strategies prove to be successful in verifying the content, your work is done.

When you encounter a claim that you want to verify, your first step is to see if any fact-checking sites like Politifact, or Snopes, or even Wikipedia have already verified or disputed the claim. If this proves to be a dead-end, your next step is to locate the source of the information.
If the claim is about research, try to locate the journal it originally appeared in. If the claim is about an event, look for the news publication in which the event was originally reported. If the source of information is reputable, such as the journal Science or the newspaper the New York Times, you can stop here. If not, your next strategy is to find out what others have written about the source.

Look for information about the author of the claim, as well as any credentials and affiliations that they may have. Are there any reviews or commentaries about the information?
If you find that the source of the information is not trustworthy, or cannot be verified at all, then your last strategy is to circle back, and start the process over again. Try finding an alternate source that can be verified.

In addition to the four strategies discussed in the last section, it is especially important to fact-check claims when they evoke strong emotions. Some of the information found on social media or the web may cause us to experience emotions such as happiness, anger, pride or vindication, and our inclination is to immediately share this information with others. Remember to verify these claims, just as you would when you fact-check statistics for inclusion in an academic paper.

You do not need to know much of the background of this tweet to see its emotionally-charged nature. President Trump had insulted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic Senator from New York, and characterized the tears that Schumer shed during a statement about refugees as “fake tears.” This tweet reminds us that Senator Schumer’s great-grandmother died at the hands of the Nazis, which could explain Schumer’s emotional connection to the issue of refugees.

Or does it? Do we actually know that Schumer’s great-grandmother died at the hands of the Nazis? And if we are not sure this is true, should we really be retweeting it?
Our normal inclination is to ignore the need to fact-check when we react strongly to content, and researchers have found that content that causes strong emotions (both positive and negative) spreads the fastest through our social networks. For further reading, see “What Emotion Goes Viral the Fastest?” by Matthew Shaer. Activists and advocates take advantage of our emotional response to information.